


up against and for

by Desmodus



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Post-Timeskip | War Phase (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-22
Updated: 2021-02-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 13:33:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29635389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Desmodus/pseuds/Desmodus
Summary: “I’m not doing anything at all for him,” Felix says, irritated, though it isn’t clear with whom. He doesn’t say:I wouldn’t know how; I’ve never soothed a bear trap; I’ve never been elbow deep in a wasp’s nest with intent to shake hands.Nor could he bear:I’m closer to being these things than pacifying them.—Felix and the burden of becoming human to himself, plus the terror of becoming human with others.
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 3
Kudos: 13





	1. mealtime

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> see end notes for cw

When the Blue Lions make good on their promise to reunite at Garreg Mach it seems even more remarkable against the backdrop of the ruined monastery. 

The shape of the stains still on the floor are legible in awful ways. There are pools tracked through backwards in retreat and paths the width of a body dragging itself. It tells the story not so old of their would-be graduation. 

What was ceremony only in the way that battle is. The stables had burned and high walls crumbled. Their peers cut down in front of them. And what held the place up from within, its church and its people, had set out to fight but fled or died.

Seeing the aftermath now said it, loud as it had back then: certainty didn’t exist in the physical, and the bonds in which a promise lived were horrifyingly precious. They were here to make war, and were themselves the resources for doing so. 

They meet and they go to work. The likeminded and the lost trickle in. They receive clusters of kingdom loyalists. They brought with them meagre forces of what could be diverted from their family’s armies. Civilians displaced by the war seek shelter. Suddenly, they have people to care for. 

It requires a coordination of effort, living with more than oneself. They needed what they needed for food, sleep, bathing. Protection. The fucking roofs not caving in. In some ways literal and spiritual,  the force is fed on its own efforts. Doing what could be done, what immediately sustained them, buoyed and unified even the haggard among them. 

It’s a kind of survival that is straightforward in the way that endlessly battling back the empire never was. You would dress one wound only to sustain another. Seal one crack in the dam, slay one head of the hydra; it was to say the fighting wasn’t every day, but the war was. 

When Ferdinand and Felix work throughthe debris in the kitchens, clearing the way for Ashe and Annette to kindle the hearths, the dinner they scrape together that night is a more heartening victory than any in recent memory. 

There are places in the monastery the recirculating vitality doesn’t reach. 

The figurehead of their collective, the supposed lynchpin of their success, has the curious effect of inertia and it stretches in a circumference around him.  Those with the aplomb to try to clear the rubble from the cathedral learn fast what it is to breach Dimitri’s consciousness. Who he was five years before is a useless map for what he is now. 

Work in the area stops before it is more than well-meant plans. When driven away, the good samaritans pass unknowing through the swath of Felix’s observation. 

Felix is watchful with the resolve and intensity of a smoldering thing. Quietly, and without action—for the time he is there among the dark of the pews, not breaking the skin of his palms hauling or repairing or training—he is constant. 

Maybe while he sits, he hates to name it though it is, _vigil_ _,_ he thinks of insults spent failing to understand Dedue’s unflagging devotion to Dimitri.

If Felix thinks of this and feels shame, it is in equal parts for his actions then and now. How he hates hypocrisy in others and doubly in himself. Especially when he can’t find any other path, currently. It feels like a defeat to be at a standstill. The best he can do isn’t the confrontation he is prone to but instead playing poorly at a keeper. 

Dimitri is a relief when there is less to look at. When he is not snarling at people kind or unwitting enough to approach him. He is right now as he largely always is: still for long stretches then violently alive with sudden movement.  His back to every exit except the sky, he stands attendant to the rubble at the far end of the cathedral, though there is no one and nothing present in the pile of dirt and stone to explain what motion he is tracking, or why he will take up conversation with the air, his voice a low rumble. Felix knows why but wishes he could claim not to. 

Sometimes Dimitri paces the perimeter of the wreckage, pausing to look aimless into the hole where the ceiling caved sometime during the siege. Sometimes he goes to his knees as in prayer. Felix knows Dimitri not to have prayed for years, at least the years Felix knew him to be alive, and Dimitri kneeling still keeps his spear clenched tightly upright in one fist. 

Other times, Dimitri will curl over and in on himself, and Felix takes it as a personal challenge that he never cover his ears to the screaming that comes then. 

Today has been quiet. What should put Felix at ease has never once seen the tension out of his body in this place. From a distance Felix hears the heavy scrape of a door. Footsteps draw close from behind. Lighter than they could be, deliberately not silent. One row back the pew creaks and Felix waits.

“He do anything interesting?” Sylvain asks. Felix narrows his eyes. Doesn’t turn his head. He catches red hair in his periphery. Sylvain has leant forward, is speaking quietly, though they’re not particularly close to where Dimitri stands, still for the moment. 

“He’s an idiot, not a jester. I’m not here to be entertained.” 

Sylvain hmphs airily, not quite a laugh. “I know you’re here for his health, not yours.” 

Felix turns a quarter at that. 

“I’m not doing anything at all for him,” he says, irritated, though it isn’t clear with whom. He doesn’t say  _ I wouldn’t know how; I’ve never soothed a bear trap; I’ve never been elbow deep in a wasps nest with intent to shake hands.  _ Nor could he bear:  _ I’m closer to being these things than pacifying them.  _

Sylvain tilts his chin, his mouth tightening and his eyes dip briefly to the floor. His eyebrows do something between acknowledgement and retreat. 

“It’s past dinner,” he says. “Have you eaten?” 

A short exhale from Felix. No, he hasn’t. Somehow twinned with the thought is: neither has Dimitri. 

Sylvain stands, having retrieved his answer in Felix’s lack of one. “We can eat in the garden,” he says, tipping his head in the entreaty he doesn’t voice. 

Felix turns his whole body to face him, blocking Dimitri from his sight for the first time in hours. Looking at Sylvain straight on, Felix takes in the way his hair is pushed up off his forehead, styled by sweat and dried that way. 

The dirt across his face, fingernails painfully split and knuckles cracked like arid earth. Weariness or ache or both overtake his usual posture. After working and before bathing or even eating, Sylvain, who hates being dirty, sought out Felix.  Felix feels a complicated way about that. His instinct is to chastise the selflessness, the lack of self-tending. He pauses, ostensibly deciding, looking at Sylvain though not in the eye, and he registers that Sylvain could chide him the same: Felix who is similarly dirty from work though certainly less aware of it, not even ignoring hunger because he has attributed the gnawing in his stomach to something separate from the need for food. 

“Fine,” he says, and rises to join Sylvain. 

**

They take a simple meal outdoors, and a bath that is spent going through the motions with their heavy limbs. Sylvain, moving slowly beside him, doesn’t even attempt to flirt in the fatuous way he is wont to. 

For a few minutes, chest deep in water Sylvain heated with the sigil for fire, Felix just sits with a washcloth over his face. Head titled toward the ceiling and breathing slowly. There is perhaps no one else he would trust with his blindness save for the man next to him. 

When they separate for their rooms, there is a moment after they’ve bid goodnight, when Sylvain looks like he has something more to say. He stands facing Felix even as Felix makes to leave. Midway through the motion, Felix pauses, one eyebrow arched as a question.  Sylvain gives the smallest shake of his head, the corner of his mouth tilting up. He raises a hand in goodbye. Felix shoots him a nonplussed look but keeps on with his leaving. 

Felix spends an idle half hour tending to his swords and the knife from the sheath on his thigh, and the smaller knife from his boot. 

There isn’t much to be done because of the same meticulous routine he’s performed the night before and each night before that. For now at least he is more likely to wield a shovel than a sword but it would be unthinkable to be unarmed, hasn’t been since the war started. 

When the edges shave the hair off his arm at barest pressure, Felix makes an honest run at sleeping. The fruit of the endeavor is a restless few hours tossing, trying not to think and thus thinking, in circles, passing over itself and again, concluding nothing. 

He curses under his breath and rises, shrugging a cloak on over his nightclothes, dagger strapped beneath it, and makes for the kitchens. 

**

The cathedral is a larger place at night. It sows a bounty of shadows and in them could be anything. It puts Felix on alert. He likes to think it good instincts more than an old fear of meeting the dark. 

There is a moment where, as Felix makes his way toward the small mountain of rubble, he thinks Dimitri may have actually left. He had not seen it happen so far but it was foolishness to expect a pattern never to break.  It’s still a startling notion for reasons unclear. But drawing closer Felix finds the shadow that resolves into his shape: the man who would perhaps live to be king if he managed to live at all. 

Dimitri is sat on the ground, his knees drawn up, a lance lain across his lap behind them. Felix’s approach, not at all silent, must startle him, and Felix is not sure what restraint keeps the lance pointed at his throat rather than speared right through his face. Maybe it is simply that Dimitri didn’t feel like rising into a throwing position. 

“It’s me, Boar,” Felix says, not looking at the weapon, and he drops smoothly to the floor. The glint of the lance tracks him the whole way down.

Once seated Felix looks to his face, checking for sign of recognition there. He can’t make out anything with certainty. 

Dimitri grunts, lowering his weapon back down beside him. 

Felix shakes his head but doesn’t say anything as he withdraws a cloth napkin from his pocket. He unfolds it and places it in the space between them, a gap measured by the length of Dimitri’s spear. Sitting in the moonlight between them: bread and hard cheese, jerky, and a handful of berries to stave off scurvy. 

“I have no idea how you’ve managed so far,” Felix says. “But you need to eat.” 

Mercedes and Annette had tried, the week before, to bring him a tray bearing an actual meal. At first Dimitri ignored them. When pressed, he riled quickly into yelling. From his place at the back of the cathedral, Felix heard it as it peaked— “Out. There is no point to this!  _ Out!”  _

His rage, the violence poised beneath it, was enough to drive them off, even more a threat for how no one could know when the scarce charity of Dimitri’s restraint would evaporate. 

They left the tray at his feet anyhow. They passed within a dozen feet of Felix on their way out: Mercedes’ hands on Annette’s shoulders. Annette frustrated to tears and Mercedes’ mouth set in a grim line.

Felix doesn’t expect his chances are better in persuading a beast to eat. But even as he thinks this, he finds he has to amend: an animal’s rage is in service to its own preservation, and so this thing before him that refuses even that must be human. 

Dimitri says nothing, makes no move toward the food. Felix fights down his rising impatience. He chose to come here.

Felix helps himself, breaking off a corner of the cheese, a bit of the bread to go with it. He’s not hungry, but he feels compelled to demonstrate it’s not poisoned. The royal family have always had safeguards against assassination attempts of this nature, but that’s a life so far apart from the one Dimitri is now living that Felix isn’t certain it’s among his concerns. 

Felix swallows thickly around the bite of bread and cheese and wished suddenly that he’d thought to bring water. Unsure ifDimitri was seeking out even that much. But he must have developed some habits to keep himself alive in the intervening years. Though Felix suspects it is the grace of his crest that bore Dimitri through most of it. 

Felix reaches for a berry and chews it slowly. It’s more tart than it is sweet. His display probably isn’t having any effect soothing or otherwise, he decides. He eyes Dimitri’s face. The crumbled ceiling lets the moonlight in but Dimitri sits just beyond it. 

The shadows aren’t kind to him, hollowing out the bone beneath his eye, making him look as though he’s lost them both. Felix knows it’s the limit of his own perception in the low light. He still would rather not look, if this is what he’ll see. 

“Eat,” he says again. “How do you plan to cut your way forward without any strength?” 

He’s pandering but it’s a fair point. Felix hasn’t seen sign of Dimitri’s obvious mistreatment to his body, he is never without heavy cloak and armor, but his cheekbones cut through his face, and the dark circle beneath his visible eye never fades, purpled like a bruise. 

“Why are you here.” Dimitri’s voice is startling, abrupt in the quiet.

There’s many dozen strings knotted, each an answer to that. Felix doesn’t know each of them for what they are but he can feel them there inside him. A bigger mess than he’s ever learned how to look at. 

“You’re weaker than you ought to be. You’d do well to eat more.” And sleep. And speak to anyone besides ghosts. 

Dimitri huffs out something like a laugh, no trace of joy in it. “None of whom I’ve murdered would claim to know anything about my weakness.” 

“And you think slaughter is the only strength,” Felix says, acidic, unsurprised. “You’ve left to rot every part of you that’s ever tried to keep your savagery in check.” 

“Of course,” he bites out. “Of course I have. It’s what’s required. There is nothing left in me to need for anything. The dead arrange my priorities.” 

“Do they ever tell you to eat?” 

“You just have, though it is a first.” 

Felix shakes his head in a tight movement. “I’m not dead,” he grits. “I’m right here.” 

“I was there, I saw you die,” Dimitri says. It sounds worn with repetition. “I saw your flesh bubble, Glenn. The only difference between us is my corpse can be of use a while longer.” 

Felix feels physically struck, his vision narrowing momentarily to nothing, and the overwhelm is the only thing that stills him long enough for Dimitri to finish his sentence. 

He is on his feet, head buzzing. “I’m not him, damn you, I’m not Glenn!” He stoops for the napkin, scoops it up with its contents, and flings them at Dimitri. He won’t be the only one to have his misguided kindness thrown in his face. 

“You’re fucking pathetic. Claiming to be a corpse doesn’t absolve you of what you owe the living.” 

Dimitri just looks up at him, food strewn around him. 

“Say something you fucking animal. Speak!” 

Distantly, resigned, Dimitri says, “You didn’t used to sound alike, but after you died, Felix took so much of you onto himself. Direct like you, but so much harsher.” 

Outside himself, Felix screams and throws himself upon Dimitri, pinning him to the floor where Dimitri’s head smacks against the stone. Maybe it’s the daze from hitting his head, but he doesn’t stop or evade Felix as Felix rears back and punches him: once, twice, splitting his lip, the blood running into his mouth and filling the spaces between his teeth. 

Dimitri’s gaze focuses on Felix’s face as Felix pulls his fist back for another blow. “It’s you,” he says. “Felix.” 

“Don’t you  _ fucking _ use my name now,” he snarls. Flecks of his spit land on Dimitri’s face. “Fuck you, fuck your dead, your father, your mother—they’re as useless as you are now.” 

Dimitri’s eye narrows. Felix finds himself subjected to Dimitri’s sudden and brutish strength as the boar flings him bodily away. 

He lands hard on his side and Dimitri is upon him instantly, lowering to meet him, and he returns the blows Felix dealt in kind. 

The first crack of Dimitri’s fist upon his jaw rattles him badly. The battle composure he’s honed for so long falters. There is a moment where he isn’t in or outside of himself, it’s almost as if he’s gone, the place in his skull he occupies whited out by pain. 

When his awareness slips back in a fraction of a second later, he misses that obliterated place. Not because it was painless but because the pain required nothing of him. Nothing to prepare for or push through. It wasn’t a relief that had ever before occurred to him. 

He blinks up at Dimitri, the body bracketing him, the man he shaped his fighting around. Each time Dimitri laid him out in the dirt through sheer power, Felix stood back up with a new measure of himself. It wasn’t that Felix was weak. Life, Dimitri somewhere near the center of it, had demonstrated to him he needed something beyond strength.

With Dimitri to measure against, Felix became quicker, more astute. In training, then in battle, he assessed his opponent’s weak spots as second nature then tore them wide.  He’d built himself on knowing and seeing, making his own advantages, exactly because there was always a point at which enough power could force him to yield.

Dimitri punches him again, and when he can think once more, he recognizes this isn’t that power. The one with no room for quarter. If Dimitri cared to do so, or really, if he paid no mind at all, there’s no doubt that he could simply shatter Felix’s skull. 

Before another blow can land, Felix rears up and headbutts Dimitri, giving him enough of an opening to scramble out from under him and rise to his feet. Dimitri does not follow him, kneeling motionless on the stone where they both were a moment ago. 

There is a silence in which they simply watch each other, Felix breathing hard and Dimitri slightly less so.

Dimitri raises a hand to wipe his bloodied mouth. “You should kill me,” he says. 

Felix’s muscles tense and thrum. He gnashes his teeth and it sends pain shooting up through his jaw. 

“You should eat,” he spits back. 

**

The return trip to his room isn’t slow or fast but that is because Felix’s presence of mind is such that he can register his disorientation but not care for its consequences. 

That is, until he is passing by the dock, and hears someone utter “Ah,” softly from his right.

His hand flies to his dagger, heart rate kicking up, and he should have been more alert, damn him and damn the boar.

Knife in hand, he wills himself to focus past the ache in his head and survey the threat. He finds it is Ferdinand, looking not much a threat at all, empty palms raised in conciliation, appearing more perplexed than afraid. 

“Felix,” he says, inclining his head in greeting. “What are you doing awake?”

Felix glares for a moment before sheathing his weapon, then heaves a sigh. “What are you doing there?” 

Ferdinand lowers his hands to his lap. “I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “I thought I would get some air.” 

Felix shakes his head in a short motion, as though brushing off the irritation of his previous overreaction. “Right. It’s none of my business, actually. Goodnight.” 

“Wait,” Ferdinand calls as Felix makes to leave. “Felix, what’s happened to your face?” 

Felix pauses, annoyed he hadn’t had the cognizance to at least wipe the blood from his nose. “Nothing’s happened. It’s fine.” 

“Mm,” Ferdinand hums. “Well it is seems like nothing has gone and bashed you about the head.”

Felix snorts a little in spite of himself, the gesture stirring up no small pain.

“Sit here a moment, please?” Ferdinand says mildly. “I’m no healer, but I have magic enough to take the edge off, I think. It should be enough that you might yet stand a chance of getting to sleep.” 

Felix pauses, and finds that no particularly strong mistrust or dislike rises to object. He joins Ferdinand on the bench tucked into the corner where the stairs meet the dining hall courtyard. 

“Are you concussed?” Ferdinand asks, not touching Felix at all by way of assessment, in fact he is merely looking, his hands still in his lap. 

“No,” Felix bites out instantly, for no very good reason. “Maybe,” he amends after a beat. 

“Hmm,” Ferdinand has leaned down slightly to consider Felix’s right eye. From the tenderness there Felix can assume it’s blackened. 

“Unrefined as my skill is, it will be more effective if I touch you. Is that alright?” 

Felix knows this about healing already; his is shoddy enough. “Fine,” he says stiffly. 

Ferdinand cups the side of his face so lightly Felix can barely tell he’s being touched at all. Naturally he looks anywhere but Ferdinand’s face. A faint glow lights the space between them and a kind of warmth spreads from the point of contact. It’s warm like sitting with your back to the sun. 

Felix feels the worst of the pain receding. Its lessening makes clear how badly he felt prior. Definitely concussed, at least mildly.

Even so, even with the warmth, the healing lacked the kind of escape, however brief, provided by the violence that necessitated it. Felix has the thought and hates the thought and shoves it down and away. Just what the fuck was wrong with him. 

“Alright, I think that’s about the limit of what I can do,” Ferdinand says, pulling his hand away. “Mercedes could certainly handle the remainder in the morning.” 

“It’s fine. It doesn’t need it.” Felix is just satisfied to have the ache in his jaw dulled to something ignorable, and his good sense returned with treatment of his concussed brain. 

“Your eye looks better, I think.” 

“I don’t know what it looked like before.” A pause, then: “Thanks,” he says, willfully less grudging than he is prone to, and even then only managing somewhat. 

Ferdinand quirks a small smile. “It isn’t any trouble at all,” he says, and turns to look out across the water of the pond. 

It’s a natural opening for Felix to leave, but he stays seated a moment more. “Will... Are you going back to sleep soon?” 

This makes Ferdinand turn his gaze from the water back to Felix. His features betray faint surprise before he smiles again, both softer and larger than the first. 

“I certainly should try,” he says, a little rueful. 

Felix knows enough to know that asking anything else would be prying. There is another moment of silence where Felix just listens to the almost inaudible shifting of the water, and even quieter than that is Ferdinand’s breathing. 

Felix stands up to leave. “I uh. Hope you get some rest,” he says. 

“You too, Felix,” Ferdinand answers, and raises a hand in goodbye. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for mental health stuff related to Dimitri’s post-ts mental state (reference to malnourishment, hallucinations) + Felix not taking kindly to it and ensuing violence


	2. work, broadly

In the morning, Felix could feel worse. He rises near dawn, ignoring what isn’t exhaustion but is more than tired. His right eye socket is colorful. He spends just a moment looking it over in the small mirror atop his dresser. 

There is very little swelling. Ferdinand had done well; what remains is yellow and light purple, with a smudge of red at the bottommost curve of the socket, like someone swiped a thumb of paint there. It almost intersects with the bruise on his cheek, this one even further along in its healing. 

This morning, he doesn’t stop by the kitchen though he’d usually swipe some bread before the day’s work. He pockets some of the travel rations from a rucksack he’d never unpacked upon returning from a skirmish. He takes his sword, and his dagger, and leaves his room quietly. 

** 

Garreg Mach is too large to ever be fully secure. That is Felix’s sense of things. It would be different if it were populated as it used to be, with a full garrison of Knights of Seiros and rotating guard duty. Rag tag as they are there is no telling what threats could reach them by squeezing in through a gap. 

Felix walks the outer perimeter of the monastery, eyeing the walls, looking for signs of a breach. The work they’d done so far was largely inside Garreg Mach, on the facilities that serviced their basic needs. But the destruction of the battle five years ago had happened outside-in, and while Dimitri held his own in the time he’d spent holed up here, it was only his own. Everyone needed protection. Security not being the same as overpowering the already-present threat. 

Felix finds a section of stone that is partly crumbled along the northwest wall. Spanning a little more than three meters across and a few heads taller than himself. It made sense they hadn’t noticed. It opened out into the space behind a building tall enough to hide it. Somewhere behind the defunct sauna, he estimates. 

He sets down the tools and materials he carried with him: shovel, pickaxe, trowel. The sack containing a mortar base of sand and lime slumps over when he drops it beside the oilskin sack meant for mixing it with water. 

The pile of rubble is large and the sun not high at all. He goes to work. 

It is about the time he is cursing himself for forgetting to bring gloves, once again, that he notices it. He wipes the sweat threatening to trickle into his eye before taking a better look. As though he needs a better look. 

He’s seen bodies in all states of decay. The arm he has just barely uncovered is little more than bone. Sure of it now, he stops, looks upward at nothing, then back down at the large pile of what he broadly considers work. 

He moves every piece of rubble into a heap beside the gap in the wall. He intends to fit them back in place later. Some work takes precedence. 

The body wears an officer’s academy uniform. It isn’t that an imperial soldier would be better exactly, but save for a select few, Felix wouldn’t have cause to try and wrack his brain for a face, for some way to identify the person that wore this uniform, personalized in the ways they’d all taken to. 

Maybe there is something that would be telling. Something identifiable. It crosses his mind unbidden that it would be a disrespect not to try. He breaths out one short exhale and sets to looking. The body was sheltered from larger animals like wolves and foxes but few things could stop rats and insects. Even most of the hair had been scavenged by something. 

Felix is sure of only a few things: it is a girl’s uniform, they had long, dark hair, and there is nothing to indicate a name, neither family nor given. One hand bore a ring, silver. The inlaid red jewels, crusted with dirt, don’t catch the light.

There is a standard issue short sword that he finds a few feet from the body. The fact that they aren’t wearing armor but have a weapon is a small puzzle. It’s as if they weren’t prepared to fight. But they all were, that day, and Felix finds himself standing, looking down and thinking.  _ Why? Why did you stay if not to fight?  _

He would say he isn’t one for speculation but still answers occur to him as questions.  _ Could you not decide? Was there someone you hoped would leave with you? Did they refuse?  _

He closes his eyes, exhales with force for want of expelling the line of thought. 

He opens his eyes again and starts in on digging a grave. Not his first, and to hope it would be the last could be taken as a curse as much as a plea. 

** 

Chest deep in a hole shaped for a body, Sylvain finds him. 

“Fuck,” is what he says first. “Fuck, Felix, what...?” 

Felix doesn’t look up or stop digging at the sound of his voice. The explanation is laid out on the ground and doesn’t require him. 

Sylvain comes to stand beside the grave. Felix, with his back to him, knows this only by sound and the weight of presence. If he’s waiting for Felix to look at him he can keep waiting. 

“Felix,” he says, after a moment of presumably just watching. “Buddy,” he says, after Felix doesn’t answer. Another thing to which he does not answer. 

“Stop? Please? Your hands are bleeding.” 

They are. And his back and shoulders ache. He is sweaty, and dirty, and in a distant way, he recognizes he is thirsty. None of these seem like good reasons to stop. So he doesn’t, not until Sylvain gets a hand on the shovel and holds it still. 

Felix whips around to look at him then, nostrils flaring. Sylvain sucks in a breath as a hiss. 

“What the fuck,” he says. “That wasn’t there last night.” 

Felix just blinks. Sylvain must read into this. 

“Your eye,” he says by way of explanation. 

Felix tugs on the shovel. 

“Okay,” Sylvain says. “Okay.” He lets go of the shovel and hops down into the grave. 

Standing right in front of Felix, very close to him now, Sylvain says, “You look fucking tired. Take a break. Please. Let me finish this.” 

When Felix catches his face, it is almost by chance, his eyes seeing more than they are looking. The expression there latches in him, fits into his understanding without him trying. There will be a fight if he refuses any farther. 

“Fine,” he says, setting the shovel aside. His limbs are stiff as he climbs out of the grave. There isn’t anywhere to be that he can’t see the body. He sits down against the wall. He finds that Sylvain is looking at him from the hole. 

“Here,” he says and tosses something at Felix. He catches it without thinking; it’s a water skin. “I doubt you brought any.” 

Felix did but also he didn’t; the water for mixing the mortar isn’t potable. Felix takes a drink, then another. His hands burn where he’d gotten blisters and ignored them as they broke open. 

It isn’t in him to sit idle. Or he especially can’t stand it right now. After a few minutes watching Sylvain dig, feeling far away, he gets to his feet and starts arranging the rubble into a wall again. 

“That’s not what a break is, Fe,” Sylvain calls. 

Felix begins making rows and stacks of stones in the gap, selecting for compatibility and stability. There might be some artistry inherent to the process, were he someone else. If he were himself but different. As it is, he will do it until it is done. After, there will be another job and he will do that too. 

The stones are stacked four rows high when Sylvain calls to him that he’s finished. 

The next job. He almost let himself forget it. 

He has to move the bones one by one. There isn’t a better way with what resources he has at hand. Sylvain seems to realize this at nearly the same time as Felix. 

“I’ll get in there and you can hand them down to me,” Sylvain says.

Felix shakes his head. “You hand them to me,” he says, and climbs down. 

It is nothing like laying stones. Felix can’t stop himself registering every way in which it is different. Weight, shape, fragility; the arrangement no longer requires structural stability and yet the configuration still matters. 

Felix shovels the dirt back in while Sylvain makes himself wordlessly scarce, poking about in the woods. He returns as Felix  is smoothing the soil, tamping it and making it compact. He has a large rock beneath one arm and a small bouquet of yellow wildflowers in his hand. 

Sylvain gives him a sort of questioning look. Felix doesn’t think he needs permission but he nods anyway. At that Sylvain sets the rock at the head of the grave. It is dark stone, half covered in moss. He keeps ahold of the wildflowers. 

Felix places the ring he’d found at the base of the stone. He looks at the short sword and finds himself hesitating. He had no guidance here; was this person a warrior? Would they have wanted to be known as one in death? What would Felix be honoring to mark their grave in this way? 

The blade was clean of any sign of blood left to dry on its surface. It seems they didn’t get a chance to kill; it seems they were killed without even being noticed, in hiding behind a building. Incidental.

Felix rises to his feet and tosses the sword in the direction of the rest of his supplies. 

Sylvain watches him and says nothing of the action. He bends to place the flowers on the grave. 

“Do you want to say anything?” he asks Felix. 

Felix looks at him blankly. “No,” he says. Then: “Sorry.” But the second part doesn’t seem directed at Sylvain. 

There is silence for a moment. Sylvain reaches out to touch Felix’s arm, using the back of his hand, like he were checking his temperature. Felix steps away without looking at him, and returns to the wall that isn’t yet repaired. 

Sylvain heaves a sigh as he trails after him. “Really? This isn’t enough for one day?”

“I’m not going to rest knowing there’s a sizable gap in our defenses,” Felix says, adding a stone. “I should have found this sooner.” 

“ _We_ should have found it,” Sylvain says, and he squats to sort through the pile, looking for the next usable stone. Neither of them talking just about the wall. 

**

Sylvain accompanies him through the mundane necessities of bathing and eating once again. Felix doesn’t need guidance. But it might be that he does a better job under Sylvain’s gaze. What passes for fine by his standards earns him a sideways look by Sylvain’s. Fall too short and he might get a talking to, or worse, a gentle expression of outright concern. 

What’s irritating is Felix knows that Sylvain is the same about caring for himself when Felix isn’t around. Hypocrisy in others, hypocrisy in himself. As much or as little as they can, they elbow each other toward a middle ground away from outright self-neglect. 

They share in their meal with Annette and Mercedes and, unexpectedly, Linhardt, who has been generally solitary or simply exists on a different schedule. He has the air someone roped into joining. Given who he arrived with this probably is the case. 

There is some concern that apparently must be immediately expressed about the state of Felix’s face. Like he hadn’t fielded enough already. 

“It’s fine, it’s already fine,” he says in response to Annette’s determined line of questioning. 

“Oh, is it Felix? Is it fine?” she says, slightly heated. “Or are you just being tough by never needing anything?” 

This could be an excellent, protracted fight if Felix had an ounce of the required vigor left anywhere in him. 

“I could heal it for you, if you like,” Mercedes offers, tearing a piece of bread in her hands. 

“It’s been healed already, he says,” Sylvain interjects with a theatrical sigh. Traitor. 

“By who?” Linhardt asks, curiosity apparently piqued. 

The two of their chief healers sitting around the table, and neither having a hand in assisting Felix, this suddenly seems a very interesting question to everyone. Dealing with the full focus of the group isn’t easy on him. 

“Ferdinand,” he says, and fills his mouth with a tough cut of steak to avoid speaking further. 

Sylvain says “wow,” softly, at the same time as Linhardt goes “hmmm” and rotates his goblet of water by the stem. 

Felix rolls his eyes. There is nothing interesting about this. He swallows and says, “I just ran into him.” 

“Into his fist? Is that how it happened?” Annette asks. 

“No, of course not,” Felix says. 

“It makes sense,” Linhardt says. “That it isn’t fully healed. He only has a mastery of the basics. Enough for a little field medicine.” 

“It was kind of him to help,” Mercedes says, smiling, but her eyes are sly with knowing. She’s someone with too much firsthand experience wrangling Felix into accepting help he didn’t think necessary. 

He was literally not in his right mind when he took Ferdinand’s offer. He isn’t going to say as much. 

“But Felix, what happened in the first place?” Annette asks, her concern writ large. Maybe it is Felix’s fault for not telling more lies. A slip-up on the training grounds wouldn’t warrant all this chatter. 

Felix shuts his eyes briefly. Anywhere but here. “I don’t want to talk about it.” 

It is maybe the uncharacteristic quiet with which he says it that tables the subject. From the corner of his eye, Felix can see Sylvain looking at him. From the corner of his eye, he can’t say for sure what the expression on Sylvain’s face is supposed to mean. 

**

When Felix is alone again he scarcely knows what to do with himself. Inspects his swords. Tries, listless and unfocused, to read for a little while but stops when he realizes he isn’t absorbing anything. There’s a part of his routine he has skipped today and it’s bothering him like an itch. In a last ditch effort of avoidance, he starts to tidy his room. 

Tidy. A few steps below actual cleaning. Consolidating a sprawl of items into slightly neater piles for quick reference. Nothing actually has a place, just general areas. Books in a stack, not a shelf. His swords leant against the head of his bed, between the bed frame and the night table. He crouches to sort through the dirty clothes that have accumulated over the past week or so. He bunches the work clothes from today in his hands and pauses. 

The dirt of other days is just dirt but this is grave dirt. Underneath the muddied clothes is a short sword. He had decided it was a poor monument for a grave but neither did he part with it. He carried it back with him, still in the mode of task completion, and tossed it aside while he picked up clothes for after the baths. 

Still crouched there, he forces himself to consider the afternoon’s activities. It’s like pressing a bruise if the point of the bruise was to ensure you could still feel properly, or at all. 

_ It shouldn’t have happened  _ is a strange thought to have about something that had taken place half a decade ago, uprooting it in time, feeling responsibility over justice that wasn’t yours to arbitrate. Is that how he feels? Responsible? 

_ It’s a replacement for a worse feeling. It’s control of the worse feeling—  _

It’s a terrifying amount of self-examination for him. He stops pressing. He feels vaguely dizzy. If the silence before was uneasy it’s oppressive now. 

Control of the worse feeling. He hasn’t seen Dimitri today. 

Already sore from the day, he goes to the training yard and runs through drills until it hurts to so much as lift his arms. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Forgot to mention but I just. Didn’t include Byleth in this at all, or any of the church folks. I didn’t feel like I had a good enough handle on them to write them. Canon divergence babey.


End file.
